The day after the now-famous – or infamous – WhatsApp chats between Rosianne Cutajar and Yorgen Fenech were made public, Prime Minister Robert Abela said that the MP had already paid her political price and did not believe that she should suffer a second time. He was referring to Cutajar’s resignation from the post of parliamentary secretary in the past legislature. At this point, he was four-square behind her.

But a few days later, there was an apparent shift in Abela’s position, possibly because his own close aides, which include members of the parliamentary group, were pushing in another direction. When confronted by journalists, he had told them that “nobody is greater than the party or the country”; and that all the good the government had done for the country should not be tarnished by single negative episodes. It was starting to become clear that Cutajar was on her way out.

Last Monday, then, less than two weeks after Abela’s original declaration, Cutajar was forced to quit. She resigned from the Labour Party’s parliamentary group in the wake of mounting pressure on her, and for the party to take action unless she does so. Minutes before a meeting of the PL’s executive committee was due to start to discuss Cutajar’s position – and which would have probably seen her being kicked out – a party statement was issued to say that Cutajar had written to Abela to inform him that she would not continue to form part of the PL group, but would stay on as an independent MP.

Rather than being unceremoniously kicked out of the PL group as Konrad Mizzi had been in the summer of 2020, Cutajar chose to resign. There is an important difference between being dismissed and resigning – Mizzi defied Labour and forced the executive arm of the party to take the decision; in Cutajar’s case, she quit before being expelled. The end result is the same, but the way things happened is not.

Aside of this comparison, the big question is: what changed between the day when Abela was so adamant that Cutajar had already suffered the consequences of her actions and the day when she resigned from the PL group minutes before she was going to be ejected? What forced Abela to make a U-turn on his position, morphing from acting as her public defender to the one who was pushing her out?

Abela must have realised that by protecting Cutajar, the Labour Party and government had nothing to gain. As PM, he had already left her out of his Cabinet after the last election and her political career was in a downward spiral. Keeping her within the PL group would have meant an endorsement of what she had done. In other words, she was politically expendable, so much so that Abela felt the need to make it clear that she will not be allowed to contest the next election on the PL ticket.

The Prime Minister is wrong to say that he was consistent in his thoughts about Cutajar. And he is also wrong to say that her resignation means that the ethical standards have gone up a notch. Abela had initially intended to retain her in the PL group – “she already paid the political price” – and it was only when pressure mounted, and with Labour already in difficulty because of the three hospitals’ scandal, that there was a change of tack that eventually led to her resignation.

But so much more needs to be done for Labour to really show that it has learnt the lesson. Cutajar was not wrong when she said that “everyone pigs out”; her mistake was writing it down, probably never expecting it to be made public, in the same way that Edward Zammit Lewis never thought that the “Laburist Gahan” comment that he had made in another WhatsApp exchange, also with Yorgen Fenech, would see the light of day.

Abela cannot ignore that Cutajar comment, but must seriously look into it. Whether he will do so, however, is another matter. The Nationalist Party has been quick to point this out. “How can Robert Abela stop those who are constantly pigging out when he was earning €17,000 a month from part-time work with the Planning Authority,” PN General Secretary Michael Piccinino said a few days ago.

By having Cutajar out, Abela can claim that he has taken action and boast as much as he like that, according to him, standards have gone up a scale. But he acted not because he was really convinced she should go; he did so only after it became clear he was losing out.

The real test for him is whether he will find the courage to stop the “everyone pigs out” mentality that Cutajar is so right about and which, ironically, cut her political career short.

As for Cutajar herself, she should have gone one step further and abandoned her parliamentary seat too.